Monday new releases: 10 February 2025

New Zealand doc­u­ment­ary mak­ing was well rep­res­en­ted either side of Waitangi Day by The Haka Party Incident and Alien Weaponry: Kua Kupu Te Ara.

There are two main ways a doco can dis­tin­guish itself – a great story or great access, and Kent Belcher’s film about the young met­al band Alien Weaponry has both. Three teen­agers from small town Northland, New Zealand, become stars of the glob­ally com­pet­it­ive heavy met­al scene by shred­ding bril­liantly and bring­ing their own cul­ture to the party – adding not imitating.

Brothers Henry (drums) and Lewis De Jong (gui­tar), along with former bass play­ers Ethan and Wyatt, got their early breaks on the cul­tur­al phe­nomen­on that is Smokefree Rockquest and were already tour­ing the fest­ivals of Europe and North America by the time they were 18 and 16 respect­ively. Traveling with their ded­ic­ated par­ents, Niel and Jette, they were also fol­lowed on that first big 2018 trip by Belcher’s camera.

He’s been around the band for six or so years which brings a remark­able intim­acy to a doc­u­ment­ary that might eas­ily have had the edges pol­ished off by a care­ful record com­pany. Instead, we see rela­tion­ships frazzle, tempta­tions being suc­cumbed to, and – in a heart­break­ing sequence – one brother’s youth­ful exuber­ance threaten years of work.

If you are not a big fan of the genre, don’t worry because there’s not enough of the music to put you off – just enough to give you an idea of what the pas­sion­ate blend of thrash­ing gui­tars and Māori wai­ata can be like. The met­al com­munity looks scary from the out­side but we also see how much aroha is gen­er­ated by these boys and their uniquely com­mit­ted vision.

There’s a Swedish film called The Five Obstructions in which, avant-garde film­maker Jørgen Leth is chal­lenged by Lars von Trier to remake his 1960s short film The Perfect Human sev­er­al times with an increas­ingly bizarre set of con­straints. I won­der wheth­er Steven Soderbergh is doing the same thing to him­self dur­ing this peri­od of his career. As if he’s find­ing that film­mak­ing comes to him so eas­ily he has to choose restric­tions in order to keep things inter­est­ing. Make a big budget HBO drama series 10-months after “retir­ing” (The Knick), release a film as a mobile phone app (Mosaic), shoot with only an iPhone (Unsane), shoot dur­ing a two-week transat­lantic sea voy­age (Let Them All Talk), shoot a Hitchcockian thrill­er at the height of a pan­dem­ic (Kimi), make a science-fiction series to be released for free on the web (Command‑Z).

With Presence, Soderbergh hasn’t chosen a pro­duc­tion dif­fi­culty, more of a chal­len­ging storytelling device. The film is a ghost story told entirely from the point of view of the ghost – a first-person view­point from some­thing that may not even be a someone.

A fam­ily of four buys a big old house and settles in but, des­pite the happy out­ward appear­ances, every­one has their troubles. Mum Rebecca (Lucy Liu) is a suc­cess­ful exec­ut­ive but may have made some unwise choices that threaten the fam­ily with leg­al jeop­ardy. Son Ryan (Eddy Maday) is an ambi­tious swim champ with a judge­ment­al streak. Daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) is griev­ing the sud­den death of a close friend. Dad Chris (Chris Sullivan) is strug­gling to keep the fam­ily togeth­er – the film is called Presence after the entity that they share the house with but it could just as well be about the lack of pres­ence that they have in each other’s lives.

One could quibble about the logic a little bit – this pol­tergeist hov­ers with a steadicam-like point-of-view but still uses the stairs rather than float over the ban­nis­ters – but using the device to eaves­drop on dif­fer­ent fam­ily mem­bers (and their guests) and occa­sion­ally inter­vene is quite a neat way to par­cel out information.

There are a couple of jumpy moments but this is a haunted house film rather than a gory hor­ror – unlike the trail­ers that played before­hand for films that I am really not look­ing for­ward to.

September 5 is a his­tory les­son set around the 1972 Munich Olympics ter­ror­ist tragedy in which Palestinian free­dom fight­ers took advant­age of glob­al vis­ib­il­ity to take sev­er­al mem­bers of the Israeli team host­age. The story isn’t par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in their cause, how­ever, but does take an interest in the irony that these Jewish ath­letes were attacked on German soil, remind­ing every­one of a his­tory that they were try­ing to forget.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

The main top­ic, though, is the media and the inven­tion – under the worst cir­cum­stances – of rolling, per­petu­al, news cov­er­age. ABC TV had the North American broad­cast rights to the games, the first time that the event could be trans­mit­ted live around the globe thanks to satel­lites. When host­ages are taken in the Olympic Village, the pro­duc­tion team soon real­ises that they are the best placed to tell the story as it hap­pens – except that they are sports broad­casters, not news journalists.

We still have rolling news on 24-hour cable chan­nels but now many us are kept informed by scrolling news instead and most of the audi­ence won’t real­ise from this 50-year dis­tance how nobody knew what they were doing in those days. And many won’t know how the story ended, either.

September 5 is a tense pro­duc­tion dir­ec­ted by Swiss Tim Fehlbaum and almost every moment hap­pens inside the crowded stu­dio that is the nerve centre of the ABC oper­a­tion – it’s a sub­mar­ine movie. Peter Sarsgaard plays real-life tv pro­du­cer Roone Arledge and John Magaro (First Cow) is the young dir­ect­or fly­ing by the seat of his pants. Leonie Benesch from The Teacher’s Lounge plays a pro­duc­tion assist­ant who becomes cru­cial to the oper­a­tion when they real­ise she’s the only one there who speaks German. MVP though is the real-life archive foot­age of anchor Jim McKay who, des­pite his sports back­ground, chan­nels his inner-Cronkite to com­mu­nic­ate the inex­plic­able grav­ity of what is going down.

Most of the act­ors in September 5 are American but behind the cam­era is almost one hun­dred per­cent European – the film was actu­ally pro­duced in Bavaria which is a unusu­al ges­ture towards verisimil­it­ude con­sid­er­ing it’s almost all shot on a soundstage.

The same is true of Widow Clicquot – every­one on the crew is French and the loc­a­tions are the vine­yards and chat­eaux of French wine coun­try but the faces and voices are almost all British. It’s the story of the inven­tion of what we now know as cham­pagne – although that doesn’t become clear until the end – by Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot dur­ing the dis­rup­tions of Napoleonic France in the early 1800s.

American act­ress Haley Bennett plays Barbe, from an estab­lished wine fam­ily and mar­ried to François Clicquot (Tom Sturridge) as a way to secure the interests of both fam­il­ies. François was innov­at­ive but unre­li­able and when he dies sud­denly Barbe – a vis­ion­ary in her own right – chooses to keep the busi­ness rather than sell.

Her only ally is Sam Riley as the charm­ing wine mer­chant Louis Buhne and, while she works on the sci­ence of spark­ling wine, he attempts to break Napoleon’s embargo. A hand­some film with a struc­ture that clev­erly keeps the real­ity of François’ deteri­or­a­tion dis­crete until the audi­ence can’t do without it. Produced by Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) and dir­ec­ted by his long-time second-unit dir­ect­or Thomas Napper (on Anna Karenina the second unit was actu­ally called the Napper unit), Haley Bennet is also Mrs. Joe Wright so it’s a bit of a fam­ily affair all round.

I only had time for one of the two new fea­ture films on Prime Video this week. The Order is based on the true story of a 1980s FBI invest­ig­a­tion into white suprem­acist ter­ror­ists. At the begin­ning, a Jewish talk­back host played by Marc Maron makes the claim that anti-semites and racists like the boor­ish bul­lies who call him will nev­er be suc­cess­ful because they simply don’t have the tal­ent or organ­isa­tion­al skill to pull off over­throw­ing the gov­ern­ment – a bold claim to be made at a time when they appear to have done just that in real-life.

Jude Law and his prodi­gious mous­tache plays the broken FBI agent determ­ined to bring these red­neck yee­haws to justice and Nicholas Hoult is the young big­ot who wants to start a race war. There’s some inter­est­ing stuff in here about how this delu­sion­al mili­tia are motiv­ated by per­ceived eco­nom­ic dis­ad­vant­age – the Trumpian argu­ment that we have been hear­ing for so long – but this is really a cops and rob­bers movie and the best thing in it is Jurnee Smollett as Law’s black FBI agent part­ner, the only per­son in the film with skin, shall we say, in the actu­al game.

I’ve harped on a bit in today’s column a bout where things get made as opposed where they look like they’ve been made but I do want to fin­ish by noti­cing that in The Order, the wide open spaces of Colorado, Missouri, Washington and California are all played by Alberta, Canada, and the post-production is all done in dir­ect­or Justin Kurzel’s home coun­try of Australia. This might explain why a run­down bar in Idaho in 1983 would be play­ing Dragon’s anti­podean smash hit “Rain” so loudly.